Modern communication networks are growing in size and complexity. As the number of consumers increases and services evolve in sophistication, the performance of these networks can degrade, in part, from link and pathway congestion. During information transport, link and pathway congestion customarily results in transmitted units of data (e.g., blocks, cells, frames, packets, etc.) becoming unevenly distributed over time, excessively queued, and discarded, thereby degrading the quality of network communications. Network devices, such as routers, play a key role in the rapid and successful transport of such information. One approach to ensuring quality is to deploy routers with more processing power and capacity; unfortunately, this approach can be cost prohibitive. Therefore, the concept of logical routers has been developed to permit the sharing of expensive hardware components. However, these logical routers, which behave independently, lack coordination with respect to the allocation of resources. Another factor contributing to cost is the development of new protocols and standards to accommodate new functionalities.
Therefore, there is a need for an approach that provides for efficient link sharing among logical routers, while attempting to preserve compatibility with current protocols and standards.